This news is a week old, but no-news has a timeless quality to it. But what’s as interesting as the story about the Iranian scientist (or “scientist” as some reports have him) who may have invented a time machine is the media’s attempt to suss out how such a fake story even made it into the news, and then how that media story itself became news. Pretty absurd, or something.
Originally, the inventor Ali Razeghi was saying things like:
“My invention easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users. It will not take you into the future, it will bring the future to you.”
Once the internet made a thing of it, these claims got walked back, his Whatever is actually:
just “a kind of agent-based modeling program that would predict an outcome given a set a of circumstances or situations.”
Whatever that is.